


3066 – New Tech

by Zatnik



Category: BattleTech: MechWarrior, Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Community: tf_speedwriting, Drabble, Gen, Post - Great Refusal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-11-03 03:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/376874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zatnik/pseuds/Zatnik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spectre is the commanding officer of a new mercenary band under the sponsorship of  Wolf's Dragoons. On a return trip from the periphery with his crew, and newly indentured Clanner Bondswoman, Aisa Thastus, he makes an interesting find.</p><p>Could there be tech out there even more impressive than that of the Clan? Could it make him rich?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Moon, Somewhere between New Exford and Eaton

**Author's Note:**

> A failed attempt to write something for TF Speedwriting community; there are no recognisable transformers characters, and I went well over the 2 hour mark.
> 
> Commanding Officer; Spectre.  
> Tactical Officer; Castle  
> Forces Deployed:  
> Lance Commander Daniel Burke ‘Hannibal’  
> Lancers Eric MacMarth ‘Scrapper’, Sarah Magolini ‘Mags’  
> Bondsman Aisa Thastus ‘Falcon’

_‘I’m not working with her’_

‘ _Get over it, Eric. You’re in love with Spectre’s C-bills. You’re not going anywhere._ ’

Spectre, CO of a minor but prospering company of mercenaries under the sponsorship of Wolf’s Dragoons had managed to break his ankle after emerging almost unscathed from battle against the Jade Falcon, while outnumbered on planet New Exford. This meant he was left in orbit with his tactical officer, a woman named Castle, to supervise from afar.

_‘Damn Clanner bitch killed Jacob, Mags. You’re just gonna let that pass while she pilots his ‘mech like she owns it?’_

His employees took his absence as an excuse to flood the comms, regardless of the fact that he could still hear them. Aisa Thastus ( _ie._ that ‘damn Clanner bitch’) was the exception. The woman was dangerously professional.

‘ _Shutup, Eric,_ ’ cut in another man, when Sarah ‘Mags’ didn’t reply. Mags was big on social egality, and small on politics; but Jacob ‘Shredder’ Silverman had made it clear he had feelings for her, so the blow was low.

Spectre frowned. His recruitment of Aisa and her cohorts hadn’t been exactly by standard procedure for an Inner Sphere mercenary outfit. He’d known it would cause issues, even before Jacob died in combat.

When the then-Star Colonel had issued a _batchall_ (challenge) for a Clan _Trial of Possession_ over New Exford –which he had been hired to defend- he’d had three options.

One, he could refuse the offer, and continue trying to fight a force much larger than his own, and using superior Clan tech’.

Two, he could accept the offer, and fight a force only marginally bigger than his own.

Three, he could accept the offer, and use guile to destroy the Clanner’s base of operations while their leader and best fighters were waiting for him to show up for the trial.

Three was by far the easiest, and he’d given it serious consideration – but he’d heard in the past that to act ‘dishonourably’ in dealing with the clan meant that they stopped acting honourably in their dealings with you, in return.

Clan use of bad tactics in the name of honour was too valuable a commodity to release, especially when his employer was offering a 3 million C-bill bonus if he accepted the challenge.

Ultimately, he’d gone for number two, and re-bargained his position to include the right to claim elements of the Falcon’s command as bondsmen if he won. Thastus had agreed, after extensive negotiation.

He won, but Jacob had died. It was a risk on every mission, which was why the job paid so highly – something Jacob had been well aware of. The opportunity to get a hold of not only Clan technology, but Clan _technicians_ was too good to pass up.

Spectre knew he’d make the same decision again, but that didn’t mean he felt good about the outcome.

_‘Falcon. Detecting energy signature on mark 2. Over.’_

Aida’s angry voice over the comms brought Spectre out of his reverie. He had yet to hear her speak in any other tone within his earshot (or commrange), and was starting to suspect that ‘angry’ was merely a feature of her accent.

 _'Confirmed,'_ Mags added ' _i_ _t looks like that’s the target – approx. 500 metres from Lead._ ’

“Proceed, Hannibal Lance.”

Without a proper satellite array to tap into, the company’s small interstellar transport couldn’t give a high enough resolution scan on the surface to just look down and see exactly what his unit was doing. If it had been he could have used the scanners to identify the signal anomaly from orbit, rather than expending the drop-ship’s preciously expensive fuel.

Fortunately Spectre and Castle could watch the goings on from afar from the perspective of a camera transmitting from the nose of Lance Commander ‘Hannibal’s’ _Uller_. For this reason he was able to see what the team discovered the moment the _Uller’s_ cockpit cleared the edge of the crater where the energy signature originated from.

Laying in the crater was a huge bipedal ‘mech, perhaps 14 or 15 metres long (nearly twice the size of the Uller), but the design was totally unfamiliar. A few moments later the entirely unnecessary comm report.

_‘Ah. It’s a mech, sir.’_

“…”

_‘That is to say, not one I’ve seen before, Spectre.’_

“Aisa?”

‘ _Falcon_. _You would think I know what that is,_ quiaff _? You would be wrong._ ’

It was possibly the longest utterance to come out of Aisa yet; maybe she was as surprised to see unfamiliar tech as everyone else.

“Alright. Get some treads and load it up. Maybe the techs’ll make something of it.”


	2. Chapter 2

It took far less effort to transport the 15m long mech up to the ship than Spectre had anticipated. That is to say; it took nearly six hours of difficult labour on behalf of the entire ground crew, but at least it wasn’t the two day operation he’d half expected.

Although the mech they had found was as large as might be expected from a heavy or even an assault-class battlemech, it actually weighed in just below the fifteen-tonne cut-off as an Ultralight. Part of the reason for this was apparent at a glance. the mech was more sparsely armoured than the FLE-14 Flea that Spectre had first learned to pilot, and much of the size was accounted for by the huge flight surfaces sweeping from the mounts on it’s rear torso.

Doubtless the mech’s designer had been aiming to keep the weight as low as possible for efficient flight - but the mech would be totally dependant on it’s pilot’s ability to evade any and all fire directed at it.

Spectre doubted that it would be able to stand up to more than one or two hits from even the lightest weaponry mounted to his own mechs.

Now that the mech was safely stowed in the ships ‘shop Spectre was finally able to take the lift down and see it with his own eyes. When he arrived, he was mildly surprised to find Aisa already on the gantry, armed only with her nearly perpetual scowl.

The crew had been insistent that Aisa and her cohorts remain unarmed if Spectre was serious about keeping them on board, unsecured. Spectre had thought it a moot point, given that he intended for Aisa to pilot Eric’s Uller. 

A few minutes later one of the four technicians Aisa brought with her had shot himself rather than board their drop ship as a bondsman. The star colonel had been furious at the man, and apologised profusely to Spectre in spite of the obvious pain it caused her pride. Spectre made his decision and granted the crew’s demands. 

Surprisingly, Aisa had agreed without complaint, in spite of the obvious reluctance she’d demonstrated in turning over a falcon-emblazoned knife she had been carrying. Everyone had tried not to think about it too hard when she said she ‘didn’t need weapons, anyway’; Aisa was close to six feet tall, and well built.

Realising he’d been staring at the woman, distracted at his recollection, Spectre gave his clanner bondswoman a nod.

“Thastus,” he said by way of greeting.

There was a pause, and she glanced at him, before turning her gaze back to the unusual mech in the room below them.

“Don’t use that name, freebirth.”

The epithet was almost free of venom, and Spectre thought the woman must be sorely distracted. He decided to let it pass. Aisa had so far stayed professional in her dealings with Spectre, but he knew she must despise her current situation. She didn’t seem to have noticed her own slip.

“Oh? I thought last names were a point of pride for Clanners.” He noticed her hand flex on the gantry rail.

She didn’t feel like talking, but she would because it was him who asked. As much as it pained her to admit it, Spectre had fought with honour, and won.

“ _Blood_ names. They are.” She said, releasing the tension in her hand with conscious effort. “But I dishonor it with my defeat by a f... your kind.”

Spectre got it, then. She wasn’t exactly insulting him by calling him freeborn, she just took it as plain fact that her own genetically engineered perfection made her superior.

Well, maybe not, but it made sense in a sort of twisted way.

“I’ll stick with ‘Aisa’ then, for the moment.” He pointed at the mech sprawled across the floor below. Nobody had been able to get it’s joints to lock well enough to park the thing upright. “What do you make of that?”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say, too, and the woman got her back up again. Maybe it was PMS.

“I am not your technician!” she hissed, and headed down to floor level, leaving him to follow or not: he did, but it took him rather longer to reach the bay floor than it did her. In spite of the wonders of ancient medicine, it still took more than 72 hours to reknit broken bones.

Aisa’s face was still set in her usual scowl, but Spectre thought he might be starting to pick up on the nuances of the expression - or he was getting paranoid and reading too much into it. At this moment he the thought it was probably contempt over his favoring his broken ankle. 

_‘Injury is no excuse for weakness,’_ he mused - it sounded appropriately clannish, even if he did just make it up.

“As I understand it you’re not even a technician, until I say otherwise”

“...Aff.” She said grudgingly.

“-But as it happens I was just after your opinion, not a technical report.”

There was pause as Aisa worked up to another concession. 

“I will try to contain my reactions” _to your unnecessary and insulting chatter._

Spectre accepted that as the apology it clearly wasn’t.

They spent the next few minutes talking about the mech, and she told him it couldn’t be clan built. Even if her tech’s had not (unhelpfully) told her they’d never seen anything like its internal systems, only Clan Jade Falcon had put any development in to land-air mechs.

She had been involved in the project as a test pilot, and knew the prototypes held barely a superficial resemblance to what was before them. He was a little surprised that she’d shared the information with him, but apparently it wasn’t a secret.

Deciding he could have a better look when the woman wasn’t there to complicate things, (in spite of vaguely enjoying the idea that his presence seemed to agitate her a bit) Spectre turned to leave. Then he thought of something.

“Aisa,” Spectre called back, “I’ll have to get you using your full name again at some point. The value of having a blood-named Mechwarrior on my crew is too great to pass up.” For one thing, the reputation that would lend him would have the great houses paying whatever he asked for his services. Hopefully.

“Hah!”

He was taken aback when she laughed at him. He’d expected either more of the tense, icy quiet he’d heard (or rather, not heard) over the last three days, or another hissy fit.

“You _are_ talented in a BattleMech, for a free-birth, or I would not be here now; but do not think you would hold your own against a blood-named MechWarrior.’’

There was a long pause.

“What?”

Aisa laughed again, but Spectre found he couldn’t pick what emotion was behind it.

“A Clansman would have known. Somehow, stupidly, it did not occur to me that you would not.” She shook her head. “‘Thastus’ is not a MechWarrior blood line. I earned that name as an Aerotech Pilot.”


End file.
